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When their entreaties were rejected, the Cossacks elected to respond with force. At the hands of people such as Vasilii Poyarkov in and Yerofei Khabarov in some peoples, including the Daur , were slaughtered by the Russians. In the s the Yakuts were subjected to murderous expeditions during the Russian advance into the land near the Lena river , and on Kamchatka in the s the Koryak, Kamchadals , and Chukchi were also subjected to this by the Russians according to Western historian Stephen Shenfield. In Kamchatka the Russians savagely crushed the Itelmens uprisings against their rule in , , and , the first time the Itelmen were armed with stone weapons and were badly unprepared and equipped but they used gunpowder weapons the second time.

The Russians faced tougher resistance when from —56 they tried to exterminate the gun and bow equipped Koraks until their victory. The Russian Cossacks also faced fierce resistance and were forced to give up when trying unsuccessfully to wipe out the Chukchi through genocide in , —1, and —7. The command was that the natives be "totally extirpated" with Pavlutskiy leading again in this war from —47 in which he led to the Cossacks "with the help of Almighty God and to the good fortune of Her Imperial Highness", to slaughter the Chukchi men and enslave their women and children as booty. However the Chukchi ended this campaign and forced them to give up by killing Pavlitskiy and decapitating him.

After the Russians tried to force the natives to convert to Christianity, the different native peoples like the Koraks, Chukchis, Itelmens, and Yukagirs all united to drive the Russians out of their land in the s, culminating in the assault on Nizhnekamchatsk fort in The killings by the Russian Cossacks devastated the native peoples of Kamchatka. Much of the slaughter was brought on by the fur trade. According to Western historian James Forsyth, Aleut men in the Aleutians were subjects to the Russians for the first 20 years of Russian rule, as they hunted for the Russians while Aleut women and children were held as captives as a means to maintain this relationship.

The oblastniki in the 19th century among the Russians in Siberia acknowledged that the natives were subjected to immense genocidal exploitation, and claimed that they would rectify the situation with their proposed regionalist policies. The Russian colonization of Siberia and conquest of its indigenous peoples has been compared to European colonization in the United States and its natives, with similar negative impacts on the natives and the appropriation of their land.

The natives were targeted by the tsars and Soviet policies to change their way of life, and ethnic Russians were given the natives' reindeer herds and wild game which were confiscated by the tsars and Soviets. The reindeer herds have been mismanaged to the point of extinction. The Ainu have emphasized that they were the natives of the Kuril islands and that the Japanese and Russians were both invaders.

In the letter they blamed both the Japanese, the Tsarist Russians and the Soviets for crimes against the Ainu such as killings and assimilation, and also urged him to recognize the Japanese genocide against the Ainu people, which was turned down by Putin. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Russian conquest of Siberia. See also: Conquest of the Khanate of Sibir. This section duplicates the scope of other sections , specifically, Genocide of indigenous peoples Russian Empire's conquest of Siberia. June Accessed 10 Feb Pierce Montreal: McGill-Queen's U.

Bruce The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians. Ithaca, N. The Russian Fur Trade, — Musin-Pushkin even had plans to add Tibetan, Hebrew, and Kalmyk to the curriculum, but these remained unrealized when he left for St. Petersburg in Petersburg University likewise appointed an Egyptian and a Persian during the early nineteenth century.

Whereas in later years, under the more assimilationist regimes of Alexander III and Nicholas II, some Asians may have faced discrimination in the Russian academy, these ear- lier appointments generally suffered no such handicaps during their ca- reers. When in Franz Erd- mann was eased out of his post as professor of Arabic and Persian letters, Kazem-Bek was transferred to the more prestigious chair. That year his colleagues also voted him dean of his faculty.

The Royal British Asiatic Society elected him a corresponding mem- ber in , an honor the Russian Academy of Sciences would also be- stow upon him in Other leading orientological groups in Paris, Berlin, and Boston followed. In he edited an Arabic edition of the Mukhtasar al- wiqaya, an important manual of jurisprudence used by Tatars and other Turkic nationalities in Russia. At the same time, he was well aware that more conservative bureaucrats might object to his relatively positive as- sessment of Islamic law.

Petersburg in , Kazem-Bek assumed increas- ing administrative responsibilities that distracted him from scholarship. Shortly after his arrival, he was tapped by a government committee over- seeing the translation of liturgical texts into Tatar, as well as by another body that reviewed Islamic legal codes. Tatar scholars distrusted the involvement of an apostate into what they consid- ered to be their own affairs, while conservative Russians found him to be too sympathetic to Islam.

Thus he wrote about the resistance to Russian rule in Dagestan, as well as concerning the Babis, a reformist sect in Persia. Unlike his German predecessors at Kazan, he took the trouble to master Russian, which boosted his popularity as a lec- turer. Aleksandr Kasimovich Kazem-Bek. While he claims to have been lonely and withdrawn during his early years at the uni- versity, his colleagues enjoyed his company.

He was much sought after as a dinner guest, especially when prominent visitors came to town. According to a French biographer of his great-grand- son, the professor fathered four children out of wedlock in Russia. But, he quickly pointed out, the Orient did not have a monopoly on decadence, as the histories of Rome and Byzantium had amply proven. It served all the caliphs in their conquests of various nations. Was not the name of Christ [invoked to purge] millions of heretics from the Church?

He saw no fundamental divide between Orient and Occident. If the Per- sian and Ottoman empires were despotic, this was the result of their cur- rent stage of historical development. By implication, their people were just as capable of enlightenment as Europeans of the modern age.

The West cannot restore enlightenment to the East.

The Battle of the GateHouse: Book One of the Last Age

Some Russian conservative editorialists of the day angrily suggested that his study of the Babis was a veiled critique of the Romanov autocracy, and in the follow- ing century Soviet authors more approvingly also detected a hidden hos- tility to tsarism. However, Kazem-Bek was anything but a revolutionary. When in Russian student unrest led to the tem- porary closure of St. At the time Russian higher education was still in its infancy, and adequately trained professors were scarce. Even in Russia, which directly bor- dered on the Inner Asian realm, the discipline had barely been recognized.

There was no embarrassment of riches. The only two reputable scholars in Russia with any knowledge of the language were Father Hyacinth the former head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing and Isaac Schmidt.

a lifetime of riches Manual

Eventually settling in the capital, he became involved with the St. Petersburg Bible Society, translating liturgical texts into Mon- golian and Kalmyk, its close linguistic relative. Although he was elected to membership in the Academy of Sciences ten years later, Isaac Schmidt does not occupy a prominent place in the pan- theon of tsarist orientologists. His accomplishments were respectable, in- cluding some important pioneering works in Mongolian and Tibetan philology.

Petersburg to learn the lan- guage from Isaac Schmidt. While agreeing to the idea in principle, Musin- Pushkin and Lobachevskii devised an alternative more in keeping with the patriotic tenor of the times. Why look abroad, they wondered, when Kazan had perfectly good young scholars of its own?

Six were sent to Kazan, where Kovalevskii and two of his comrades were ordered to study Eastern languages at the university. Although he had little choice in the matter, Kovalevskii made the best of his new curriculum. He proved equally adept at mastering Arabic and Tatar as he had Greek. He wrote many for advice, including his compatriots Mickiewicz and Osip Senkovskii. Everyone urged him to take on the challenge. As a result, in the spring of the former classicist set off on the lengthy journey with a younger fellow stu- dent, Aleksandr Popov.

Again, Kovalevskii looked at the bright side. At the highest peak I shook off the Eu- ropean dust with a fond farewell. I am in Asia! An entirely new air rushed pass my face. Formal instruction would be supple- mented by extensive stays in the surrounding area and beyond for practice among the local population. Kovalevskii and Popov conscientiously obeyed their teachers, quickly mastering Mongolian and its more colloquial Buriat variant.

The latter sojourn, which included permission to observe rituals, talk to the monks, and study the extensive collection of religious texts, sparked a lifelong interest in Buddhism. He seized this rare opportunity to travel to the Chinese capital, where he spent a year perfecting his Mongolian and picking up some Manchu, Chinese, and Tibetan in the bargain.

Kovalevskii and Popov returned to Kazan in early and were immediately ordered to St. Petersburg to be examined by the Academy of Sciences. Within two years of taking up his post, he published a gram- mar. On the advice of Father Hyacinth, whom he had befriended in Irkutsk, the Pole had already begun compiling Mongolian words and ex- pressions during his Siberian sojourn.

Upon returning to European Rus- sia he presented a 40,word vocabulary to the Academy of Sciences, which formed the basis of his subsequent lexicon. Published in three vol- umes between and , the work remains a standard reference to this day. However, the post of Academician would have entailed a move to St. Petersburg, and Nicholas I was apparently not prepared to re- lease the politically unreliable Pole from his banishment. The tsar black- balled the honor. Nevertheless, the autocracy did recognize his abilities, appointing him rector of the univer- sity that year.

Within a year of his arrival in Warsaw, Poles rose for a second time that century against their Russian masters. Aside from a lesson plan for his history survey at Warsaw, he published no more works during his lifetime. All around is decay. Much like Kazem-Bek, Kovalevskii saw the Crusades as a good example of this phenomenon: There was a time when the haughty European looked down on Asia as a sanctuary of idleness and voluptuousness, populated by savage barbarians, a land of immense luxury and servility.

Re- member how, under the banner of the Faith, innumerable masses of Christians rushed to the shores of Asia Minor, to extirpate their sworn enemies. The knights of the Cross. How many secrets its rich lands conceal! By the same token, the West also had a great deal to teach the East. In addition to his pioneering works in Mongolian language and the history of Buddhism, Osip Mikhailovich had also taught some of the leading scholars of the next generation, including St.

Perhaps his most gifted student was the young Buriat Dorzhi Banzarov. Founded in at the request of Tatar merchants, the latter possessed rare fonts in, among others, Arabic, Turk- ish, Tatar, Mongolian, Tibetan, and Sanskrit scripts. Already in the emperor had ordered his education minis- ter to consider how Asian language training for future bureaucrats could be improved. He had long advocated setting up an Asian institute to centralize all teaching of Eastern languages in the empire. With its distinguished faculty, its many Asian minorities, and its proximity to the Orient, Kazan seemed to him to be the most logical home for such an entity.

While it would take some time for the news to reach Kazan, by the decision to make St. Petersburg the new center for tsarist orientology had already been made. Petersburg University, entirely dis- solving the discipline at Kazan. Thanks to the un- usual circumstances of his Asian upbringing and his subsequent European maturation, he combined broad Oriental knowledge with Occidental scholarship.

Above all, Kazem-Bek championed a practical approach to the study of languages. And his more promising graduates were given further opportuni- ties for practice through carefully scripted study tours in the East. Petersburg, he would continue to stress the primacy of the practical in the face of con- siderable opposition from others on its faculty, who favored a more theoret- ical approach grounded in the traditions of German philology.

While Kazem-Bek considered the study of language important in its own right, he also saw a wider application. This is the sole path to true knowledge, hidden in the labyrinth of ignorance. In Catherine the Great had ordered Tatar to be taught at the First Gymnasium to train translators for government service. Another important characteristic of the Kazan school was its emphasis on the Islamic East. Intimacy with Asia did not inevitably translate into respect for its civi- lizations. In this way, the Kazan school bequeathed an important legacy, for it reminded Russians that they could learn from Asians just as they might from other Europeans.

Without such an intimate acquaintance any confrontation with its more able advocates is bound to lose much of its effect. There was a brief revival of instruction in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian during the s, but it soon foundered in the face of student apathy. Unlike its Western cousins, the Russian Church had long ago lost much of its missionary vocation.

On occasion, however, pious monks had evangelized the various Finnic tribes in the wilderness beyond Novgorod. Inspired by the charismatic Saint Sergius of Radonezh, founder of the Holy Trinity Monastery near Moscow, scores of monks established their own communities and her- mitages in the remotest reaches of northeastern Russia. Others renewed the campaign to take the Gospel to unbeliev- ers among the various peoples that inhabited the endless taiga.

Born around to a sexton in the northern town of Ustiug, Stefan became fascinated as a boy with the language of the Komi, a Finnic minority living in the region. In- spired by this prophecy, Stefan moved to a monastery, where he studied to become a missionary. At the time, spreading the word of God to the heathen involved a thorough knowledge of Greek, then the language of Orthodox theology.

While Stefan soon mastered it, he also knew that the Komi would only listen to him if he preached in their tongue. Despite initial resistance, his zeal and his sensitivity to native ways attracted many followers. By preaching in the vernacular, Saint Stefan was fol- lowing in the hallowed tradition of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the ninth- century Macedonian brothers who had evangelized the Slavs by devising a written language for the liturgy in Slavonic.

On the day of his triumphal entry into the vanquished capital, Ivan ordered all Muslims expelled and laid the foundations for a cathedral as well as several monasteries. During his eight years as archbishop, an estimated 20, Muslims in Kazan accepted the sacrament of baptism. Over the next three hundred years, missionary efforts in the mid-Volga region followed an in- consistent course, sometimes aggressive, on other occasions hesitant and discreet. And they were never motivated by any particularly great evan- gelical fervor within the Orthodox Church itself.

Diplomacy also constrained them, since Moscow was re- luctant to anger the Turkish sultan by forcibly converting his coreligion- ists. As a result, until the twentieth century, such countries had overwhelmingly Catholic populations. Their attitudes about conversion and spiritual conformity were therefore closer to the Catholic ideal. Swayed by Enlightenment ideals of religious toleration, Cather- ine II largely dissolved the missionary apparatus her predecessors had es- tablished at Kazan.

The empress even supported Islamic conversions of animists elsewhere in her realm, on the grounds that the monotheistic faith would help pacify them. Over the coming decade, however, the rising tide of Kriashen apostasy began to worry the increas- ingly nationalist autocracy. Developments elsewhere further fueled anxieties about Islam. Neither the Missionary Division nor the Theological Academy itself had en- joyed an easy birth. Thus in Empress Anna, who was par- ticularly keen to assimilate her Asian minorities, expressed her wish that the seminary train priests to tend to inorodtsy, although it is uncertain whether this desire actually materialized into language classes or other specialized in- struction during the eighteenth century.

Petersburg , the Kazan Theological Academy was responsible both for training seminary faculty as well as for supervising all education by the Orthodox Church in the sees under its jurisdiction. Since none were yet com- petent to do so, however, two instructors, Mirza Aleksandr Kazem-Bek and Aleksandr Popov, were brought in from the outside for the time being. Even here the administration bungled. Unwilling to admit this mistake to their superiors in St. Yet, if the impetus for setting up the Mission- ary Division had been growing concerns about Islam, most of its resources were soon deployed to prepare for campaigns against the Old Believers, the descendants of dissident Russian Orthodox who had refused to adopt the liturgical reforms of the seventeenth century.

Twentieth- century assessments were equally mixed. By all accounts he was popu- lar and gifted. The encounter marked the start of a fruitful collaboration. In early he was asked to join Kazem-Bek in supervising a committee at the academy to commission translations of Orthodox texts into Tatar on order of the tsar. The young professor also found that earlier efforts by mis- sionaries to shore up the Orthodox faith among the Kriashen were en- tirely ineffective.

On the contrary, we must adopt a Muslim perspective, accepting its religious worldview and conception of the past. He was also to study history and Islamic theology, both by reading classical texts as well as by visiting ancient temples and archaeological sites. A major center of Islamic learning, the ancient city had the added advantage of being in Egypt, which was by then only nominally subject to the Porte. This would prove particularly useful for the Russian visitor at a time of growing Ottoman-Romanov tensions on the eve of the Crimean War.

Moving in with a scholar, Sheikh Ali El-Barrani, he devoted his days to reading literary works and grammars, while receiving personal in- struction from his host every evening in Arabic, as well as in Muslim the- ology and law. He took long walks throughout Cairo, visiting its many mosques, monuments, bazaars, and schools, and indulged himself in a cruise on the Nile River to the ruins at Wadi Halfa in upper Nubia.

Much to his chagrin, all such expectations were dashed when in early October Turkey declared war on Russia, forcing a hasty return home. Yet despite its premature conclusion, the trip had been useful. More recently, however, zealous Western inter- lopers were proving increasingly successful in their attempts to attract the Orthodox to their versions of the Christian faith. With the help of a Tatar instructor, he initially focused on language training. He also made an effort to introduce his students to Islam through reading assignments and lively tales about his own travels.

Although technically his appointment now was as professor in anti- Muslim polemics, Nikolai Ivanovich did not pay any attention to this subject, having already deemed it irrelevant. Compared to the twenty-nine who matriculated in the anti—Old Believer curriculum in September , only twelve entered his anti-Islam department another three enrolled in the anti-Buddhist de- partment and twelve in Chuvash-Cheremis.

Even then, the aspiring clerics did so on the condition that they receive a regular salary and not be forced to become monks. Although the synod eventually rescinded this rebuff to its ablest mis- sionary teacher, by then it was too late. Much of his attention focused on assimilating Kazakhs through conversion to Orthodoxy. When Kazan University managed to reestablish a chair in Turkic letters in , it invited him to take up the post, which he would hold until While he tirelessly, if unsuccessfully, campaigned for a proper restoration of orientology there, his teaching duties remained light; the professor rarely attracted more than a handful of students, and on occasion none dared to take his gruel- ing subject.

Still reluctant to have anything to do with anti-Muslim polemics, he accepted the offer on the condition that he return on half pay at a junior rank and only teach language. In Vasilii Timofeev, a devout Kriashen who had helped him translate Christian texts into Tatar, took in a few boys from his village and began to teach them at home. Although his earlier contributions to orientology won him elec- tion to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in , he declined the honor to avoid having to leave Kazan.

Given the ultimate aim of their efforts—combating Islam and converting its followers to Christianity—the men who held the anti-Muslim chair rarely approached their subject with scrupulous objectivity. In he boosted the Missionary Department by doubling the faculty devoted to its anti-Islamic and anti-Buddhist sections to four. Petersburg Uni- versity, the academy remained a backwater for scholarship of the East until the new Bolshevik government shut it down in Petersburg intellectual and literary circles, the exotic monk left his imprint outside of academe as well, even inspiring several novels and a play.

Four years later the two empires signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk, which still marks much of the boundary between eastern Siberia and Manchuria. Kangxi hospitably treated the Albazintsy, as his Cossacks came to be known. He personally welcomed them when they arrived in Beijing, paid them the same wage as his own bannermen, and allowed them to take Chinese wives. But in , eager to secure Russian permission for his embassy to the Kalmyks, an Inner Asian people who had migrated to the steppes around the lower Volga, Kangxi relented and agreed to a mission, headed by Archimandrite Illarion Lezhaiskii.

The missions were primarily charged with saving the souls of the Albazintsy. Unlike their Catholic or Protestant counterparts, the Orthodox fathers tended not to seek new converts among the Chinese. It refrained from proselytizing, interfering in politics, in- triguing at the court, or promoting commercial goals. Petersburg, few Chinese had any illusions about Russian motives.

During the Boxer uprising of , a violent anti- European popular reaction in northern China, neither Orthodox converts nor establishments were exempt from the xenophobic fury. They were an unruly lot, and a fair number perished from drink or disease. The clergy did not always set the best example.

The head of the third mission, Archimandrite Illarion, was given to drunkenly parad- ing about the Beijing compound in drag. The University of Kazan had al- ready established a chair in Chinese philology in , and the University of St. Petersburg soon followed suit.

Meanwhile, the establishment of for- mal diplomatic relations between China and Russia in freed the fa- thers in Beijing from any diplomatic responsibilities. As the promising son of a cleric, Nikita was enrolled in the Kazan Sem- inary. He proved to be an excellent student. Within a year he was tonsured as a monk, taking the name Hyacinth. Two years later he found himself appointed archimandrite of a monastery in Irkutsk and rector of the local seminary. It was too rapid an ascent. At the tender age of twenty-four, Father Hya- cinth proved incapable of maintaining discipline among the rowdy semi- narians.

Although in disgrace, Father Hyacinth got a lucky break. Shortly after his arrival at the western Siberian city, he met Count Iurii Golovkin, a diplomat who was on his way to Beijing to negotiate better trade links with the Middle Kingdom. The count was traveling along with the new ninth mission, which was about to begin its term in the Chinese capital.

When he became acquainted with the cleric, Golovkin thought him the perfect candidate to head the mission. The archimandrite arrived at his new posting in January and would spend the next fourteen years in China. Yet it must have seemed that keep- ing the Orthodox faith alive among these assimilated descendants of sev- enteenth-century Cossacks was a hopeless task. As his predecessor, Archimandrite Sofronii of the eighth mission, had reported back to the Holy Synod in St.

The Ending Of Endgame Explained

As he labored over this work, he was troubled by the absence of a proper Chinese-Russian dictionary. The best reference was a Chinese-Latin dic- tionary that Catholic priests at the Portuguese mission had lent him. Within four years, Father Hyacinth had compiled his own lexicon, which he continued to supplement over the course of his stay. At the same time, Father Hyacinth paid close attention to political developments.

When Lin Qing, the son of a humble clerk, led his abortive Eight Trigram rebellion against the dynasty in , the archimandrite sent an eyewitness account of the unrest back to St. Upon returning to St. The religious calling was contrary to his character, and he had answered it quite by accident. If Father Hyacinth thoroughly managed to alienate his superiors in the Holy Synod, he also had some important patrons. Despite several efforts to be freed from his vows, however, Father Hyacinth remained a monk. Lauded by critic and orientologist Osip Senkovskii, among others, it was quickly translated into French.

Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Shortly after returning from China, Father Hyacinth had also made the acquaintance of the future De- cembrist conspirator Nikolai Bestuzhev. Fond of high society, champagne, and cigars, Father Hyacinth was more boulevardier than ascetic. The stout and stern German traveler—Baron Schilling. Krylov, Zhukovskii, and Viazemskii were always there too. The foreign ministry had ordered Schilling to study the local population as well as the China trade. The lat- ter goal was particularly important. Petersburg along with the previous Beijing mission per- sonnel.

Based on both Russian and Chinese sources, the work told the story of the last major westward Inner Asian nomadic migration, whose descendants settled the steppes around the lower Volga. He took his duties seriously and also found time to write articles about such subjects as Chinese statistics, as- tronomy, education, and regional government, among others. Never- theless, life in a frontier town held little appeal for the cosmopolitan cleric, and after repeated appeals to the foreign ministry he was allowed to return to St.

During the following decade, Father Hyacinth increasingly turned his attention to China proper. By he had pub- lished four more books, covering such topics as Chinese government, law, education, agriculture, and commerce, among a host of others. Reviewers almost invariably praised the author for his undeniable eru- dition.

Yet some also chided him for being overly uncritical about his sub- ject. Its four-thou- sand-year-old history had created a realm whose laws were just, its ruler fair, and his subjects well educated and orderly. The former expressed his irritation that the monk did not publish in French or Eng- lish. While he knew French, German, and Latin, he invariably published in his native tongue.

Central and East Asia, is no more re- liable than that of a blind man about colors. While the book earned Father Hyacinth his fourth Demidov Prize, Mirza Kazem-Bek wrote a scathing review, excoriating the author for uncritically replicating Chinese accounts and ignoring Western sources. What will be next—I have no idea. There would be a few more articles. Illness, however, increasingly sapped his energy, and he died in his cell in Al- though Father Hyacinth is now largely unknown abroad, his work did catch the attention of European orientologists of his day. In the Paris Asian Society awarded him an honorary membership, and several of his books appeared in translation.

Eighteenth-century Russians were certainly interested in China. While subsequent generations of orientologists found fault with his work, few denied the value of his pioneering achievement. Russian study of China surpassed Western Europe. In an age when many Western specialists often disparaged the Middle Kingdom, Father Hyacinth tended to avoid judgment.

Many subsequent Russian orientol- ogists shared his unbiased approach. This was only natural. Thus, as had been the case at the university, its orientology had a largely practical aim. But its ultimate objective was different. Many of those involved in anti-Islam and anti-Buddhist studies at the Kazan Theological Academy naturally held a strong antipathy to the ob- jects of their scholarship. However, such hostility was by no means in- evitable. To be sure, he was hardly a faithful member of the church. Despite having been praised by sub- sequent generations of church leaders, his clerical contemporaries hardly encouraged his academic pursuits.

If the contributions of Kazan University to orientology are well known, those of the Theological Academy are considerably more obscure. Petersburg school was a late bloomer. But, as we have seen, the groundwork Peter laid for studying the East did not prove par- ticularly fertile in the decades after his death.

After a long slumber, orientology in the imperial capital reawoke in the early nineteenth century under Alexander I when he set up a system of universities. When contemplating his new universities, the tsar had looked to two European models. Closer to home was the freer German ar- chetype. Both the beginnings of St. Quite the contrary, he was a good servant who happened to acquire decent manners in the household of a decent master Alexander I.

His duties were not onerous. Three years later, the young diplomat was appointed a secretary at the Russian embassy in Vienna. Toward the end of his Austrian posting, Uvarov also got to know Friedrich von Schlegel. Reiterating the ideas of such writers as William Jones and Herder, its author argued that European and Near Eastern learning, literature, and religion could all be traced back to ancient India. Elsewhere, individual chairs in Oriental letters were scattered among various universities.

Stripped of its lofty rhetoric, the basic idea of an institute devoted to ori- entology in the Russian capital was hardly original. He would not be the last. It was simply too premature for a nation whose educational system was still in its infancy. Nevertheless, unlike its predecessors, the proposal did not languish in the archives. Within a year his new father-in-law appointed him superintendent of the St. Petersburg Educational District, and he also soon won election to the Academy of Sciences.

The catty comments of contemporaries notwith- standing, Uvarov proved to be an able administrator. By he was made president of the Academy of Sciences, a post he held until his death in Meanwhile, as St. The year also saw Uvarov establish the Asian Museum in St.

Russian conquest of Siberia

Pe- tersburg. Although its holdings continued to grow, for much of the nineteenth century the museum was modestly staffed. Pe- tersburg University for most of its existence. At St. The new education minister, Prince Aleksandr Golitsyn, was of the same mind about the dangers of alien Western secular ideas as his super- intendent in Kazan, Mikhail Magnitskii. Petersburg that he deemed politically unreliable.

When the new su- perintendent convened a secret university assembly in midsummer and called upon instructors to condemn their colleagues publicly, Demange and Charmoy indignantly tendered their resignations. Runich had also wanted to liquidate Oriental letters at the institution altogether, on the grounds that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also now teaching the subject.

However, a faculty committee rejected his proposal. His compatriots eventually reviled him for not sharing their ardent desire to free themselves from tsarist rule, partic- ularly in the wake of the failed revolt of which Senkovskii repudiated with typically venomous satire. Although the university did not have a chair in Oriental letters, both Groddeck and Lelewel had studied Arabic because of their respective in- terests in philology and history, and they encouraged some of their brighter charges to learn the language too.

He also made good progress in Turkish, Persian, and Hebrew during his undergraduate years. Eager to escape a dis- astrous recent marriage, Senkovskii needed little urging. Life here was more to his liking. Baron Stroganov wanted his new interpreter to continue working on his languages, and sent him on a tour of the Levant.

I shredded my throat in the wilderness, trying to perfect the purity of my Arabic pronunciation. Two, at most, three hours of sleep on a bare slab, with a dictionary as my pillow, were enough to reinvigorate me for my renewed labors. Senkovskii continued traveling south, via Acre and Jerusalem, to Cairo.

Since they quite naturally explained relations between the two powers from the Ottoman perspective, patriots were outraged. After moving to St. Petersburg in the au- tumn of Once again, his patron Count Rzewuski intervened, rec- ommending him to the foreign minister as a translator. The northern cap- ital initially held little charm for Senkovskii. With Charmoy and Demanges on their way out, both chairs for Oriental letters would soon be vacant. Senkovskii applied for the position in Arabic, but some admin- istrators objected on the grounds that, at twenty-two years of age, he was far too young.

A few months later, however, when Vilnius University ex- tended him an offer, the education minister immediately matched it on the grounds of diplomatic exigency. Petersburg University on August 18, At the same time, the newly minted professor explained that Arabic grammars approached the subject better than the European ones, adding that the language could only really be mastered by studying the for- mer. These were no more dif- ferent than the literary and spoken versions of any Western language.

Petersburg arcade. Curiosity got the better of him, and Tutundju-Oglu began to read the piece, growing indignant at its many errors and mistranslations. While he viewed Islam as fanatical and destructive to culture, he never- theless considered it the most advanced religion in the East. Petersburg and Constantinople, Euro- peans [including Russians] and Turks are entirely irreconcilable oppo- sites. Scholarship has a long gestation period, and its rewards require great pa- tience.

For an ambitious and talented young man with a quick pen, they did not come fast enough at the university. And, as the cultural center of a great empire, St. Petersburg offered other, more immediate outlets for those with a knack for writing well. This may be unfair to Senkovskii. His American bi- ographer points out that he was never particularly close to Bulgarin, and their relationship grew distinctly frosty over the years.

Bulgarin, who was eleven years older, saw himself as a mentor to his compatriot. He was usually dressed in a blue Albanian jacket and red Turkish trousers. A red fez adorned his head. On the carpet stood a crystal hookah, through which [he] emitted a stream of aromatic smoke.

At the same time, its reviews, many of which Senkovskii wrote himself, spared no one from their savage sarcasm. A man of contradictory, often paradoxical opinions, he was the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Russian Orientalism. His vicious assaults on fellow scholars and writers alike were among the less edifying features of Russian culture under Nicholas I. Petersburg University continued to offer courses in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian.

During his years as education minister from to , Count Uvarov remained a strong supporter of orientology at the campus. His statute for higher learning of also provided for Mongolian and Tatar, although these would not be offered for another decade. What was unique was that so many of them came from the East rather than the West. All of this changed on Oc- tober 22, , when Nicholas I signed a decree to promote the St. Pe- tersburg department to a faculty.

Petersburg University. The decision to concentrate orientology in the capital had actually been made three years earlier, but jurisdictional squabbles with the foreign min- istry caused considerable delays. Accord- ing to his new education minister, Avraam Norov, St. Not only did the em- pire take up arms against Turkey in , but the Caucasian insurgency also continued to rage. Petersburg University to be trained as translators.

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The writer hopes to settle certain aesthetic and moral values which he has long examined through his writings and poetry and it's his aspiration that not only the series tell a good yarn, but within its' pages the reader finds new friends with whom they can laugh and cry. Book two - The Hordes of Shashka expands upon the storyline and it all comes to a head in the final narrative titled Children of the Gods. See All Customer Reviews. Shop Books. Add to Wishlist. USD Sign in to Purchase Instantly. Overview Assassin, Half Elf, and Sorcerer Bella - Taken from the streets of her native land as a child, she's thrust into an exotic world where assassination is as common place as mead wine.